A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
