An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – 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, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
