An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
