A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist 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 being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. 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: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
