A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked 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 revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
