A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
