A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree 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 that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
