An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
