A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
