A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
