A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
