A heated debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is 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.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
