A intense debate lately went viral on social media, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever 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 follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
