A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
