An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
