An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur 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 spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
