A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, 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 somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
