An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
