An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman 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 desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
