A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come 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 locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer 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 provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility 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, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
