An heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – 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 sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
