An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
