An heated discussion recently 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 a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily 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 took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional 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, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
