A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
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. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories 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 religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
