An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. 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, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
