An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (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 fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
