An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty 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 pastor (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 puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
