An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth 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 Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny 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 assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
