An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (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, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter 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 corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
