A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village 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 protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’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 powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
