A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
