An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
