A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid 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 completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
