A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
