An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
