An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
