A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
