An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
