A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
