A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back 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’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.