An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
