An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed 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 little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense 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 men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
