An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
