An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods 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 fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture 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.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
