A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets 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.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, 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 terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
