An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). 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, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
