A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought 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: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
