An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility 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 the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
