An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. 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 bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
