A intense debate lately went viral on social media, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured 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 with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, 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, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither 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), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
