A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’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. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
