A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially 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 equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
