An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
