A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up 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 some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. 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.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
