An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
