A intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
