A intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
