A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
