An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
