An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears 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.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof 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 TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
