An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
