An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. 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 rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite 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 proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
