An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
