A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
