A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
