An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin 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 inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
