An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women 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 series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
