A intense debate recently went viral on social media, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. 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.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
