An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
