A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation 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 the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
