An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
