A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, 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 nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. 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 souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
