A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman 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 strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
