An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
