A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
