An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), 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 who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience 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, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
