An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on 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 supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
