An intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
