A heated debate lately went viral on social media, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), 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 a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
