To Cook a Bear Analysis: A Daft Historical Crime Drama Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series
An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
