An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer 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, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (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, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
