A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
