A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
