An heated debate recently went viral on social media, following someone posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely 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 bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
