A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce 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 tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
