A intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
