An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
