A heated debate lately went viral on social media, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures 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 inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
