A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk 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 has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up 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 TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
