A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, 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 evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
