An heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective 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 confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles 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+ currently.
