A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost 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 between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
