An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (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.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast 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 somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
