An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
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 from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, 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 observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
