A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly 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 is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
