An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. 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 particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
