A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated 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 drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility 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 opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
