A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
