An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. 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: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
