A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes 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 droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
