An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view 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 allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
