An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
