A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – 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 places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming 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 slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
