A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman 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 benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character 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 anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit 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 bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour 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 a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
