A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places 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 (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility 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, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
