A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’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 start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
