A intense debate recently went viral on social media, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, 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 desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
