A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
