An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
