An heated debate recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
