An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
