An heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause 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 tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor 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 allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought 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.
