An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust 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 romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly 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 a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
