A heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried 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 the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
