An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
