An heated discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, 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 women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights 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 fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community 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 eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
