A intense debate lately went viral on social media, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse 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 peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles 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.
