An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
