An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling 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 creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
