A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears 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.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
