A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear 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 bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up 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 opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
