A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick 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 pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
