An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
