A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. 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 allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
