A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
