An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query 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 worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
