An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
