A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’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 as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
