An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, 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 the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
