An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
