A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
