A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives 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
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
