A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in 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 alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which 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 in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
