A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside 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 coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
