A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness 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 idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
