A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
