A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
