An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
