An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
