A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
