A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
