An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
