A heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
