An heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
