A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later 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 within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience 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 competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
