A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
