An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – 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 equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates 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 adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
