A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
