An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
