An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
