A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from 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 when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, 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+ now.
