An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
