A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child 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 in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view 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 serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
