An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. 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 yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
