A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
