An intense debate lately went viral on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of 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 indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up 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 is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science 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.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
