An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
