An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties 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 odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
