A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
