An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight 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 woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again 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 serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
