A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
