A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). 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 conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
