A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
