A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond 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 maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
