An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
