An intense debate recently 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 best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character 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 fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
