An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
