An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone 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 best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
