An heated debate recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
