A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
