A heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility 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, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
