A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
