An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – 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 servant 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 anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none 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), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
