A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
