An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour 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 Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
