A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought 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 once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed 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 are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
