An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences 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.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly 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, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), 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 a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
