A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based 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 pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin 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 locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
