An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
