A intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
