A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed 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 (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
