An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation 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: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
