A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where 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 in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
