A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
