A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands 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 Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
