An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, 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 odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
