An heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi 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 distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none 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 newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
