An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
