An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
