A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
