A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling 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 unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
