An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else 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 pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare 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 tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
