A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. 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 Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.