A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare 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 planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
