An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
