An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more 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, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
