An heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted from 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 as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. 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 beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
