An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later 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, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, 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 local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
