A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
