An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
