An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur 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 blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
