An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles 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+ currently.
