A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
