A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour 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 Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
