A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles 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.
