An heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain 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 adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving 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 TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.