An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of 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 droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
