An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. 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 bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
