A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
