A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
