An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on 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 profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more 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 the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
