An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end 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 evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
