An heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
