An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite 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 the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
