A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer 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 creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
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 bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
