A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view 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 adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
