An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
