An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
