A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again 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 some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
