An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed 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 community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
