A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, 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 desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
