A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from 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 amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. 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 competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
