An heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
