An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. 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+ now.
