A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. 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 effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
