A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming 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 slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
