A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures 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 possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
