A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought 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.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
