A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males 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 that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
