A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare 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 tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour 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 the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
