An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur 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 lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
