An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 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 within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
