An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
