A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’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 against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
