An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly 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 the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
