An heated debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments 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.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
