A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, 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 – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. 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 are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
