An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
