An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties 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.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series 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 fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
