A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which 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 powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
