An intense debate lately went viral on social media, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, 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 some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
