A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
