An intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up 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 adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
