An heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, 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 evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
