A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
