A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving 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 evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
