An intense discussion recently 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 a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, 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 competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
