An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
