A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
