An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, 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 opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
