An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause 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 inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
