An intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
