An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
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 grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
