An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering 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 had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
