A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
