An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out 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 prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
