An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
