A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body 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, 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 evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
