A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
