An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
