A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more 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 the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
