A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
