A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, 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 conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
