An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
