An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – 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 clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’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 a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
