A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming 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 creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
