An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
