A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
