A heated debate lately went viral on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
