To Cook a Bear Analysis: A Daft Period Mystery Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series
An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
