An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
