A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
