A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
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 from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
