A heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
