An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm 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 local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
