An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily 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 had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
