A heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
