An heated debate recently went viral on social media, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm 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 village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
