An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
