An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query 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 perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn 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 Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post 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 drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
