An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. 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 streams on Disney+ currently.
