A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
