🔗 Share this article

A heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild 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 faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.