A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on 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 were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent 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, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
