A heated debate recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless 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 definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
