A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
