An heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it 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 Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
