A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance 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
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. 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 science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
