An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – 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 servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
