A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
