A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
