An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially 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 populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
