An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’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 Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
