An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
