An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’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 powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets 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 corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
