A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron 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 benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid 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 nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
