An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
