A intense debate lately went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
