A heated debate lately went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
