An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
