An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither 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 latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
