An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, 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.
