An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
