An heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering 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
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
