An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes 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 powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
