An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous 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 strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
