A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing 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 serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
