A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives 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 to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend 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 extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
