A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined 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 the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
