An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
