A intense debate lately went viral on social media, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring 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 an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
