An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially 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 easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
