A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
