A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
