A heated debate recently went viral on social media, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.