An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. 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 were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
