A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query 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 revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
