A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare 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, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
