A intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling 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 store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. 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 are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
