A intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up 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 TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
