An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
