A intense debate lately went viral on social media, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
