An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast 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 odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
