An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility 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 fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
