An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. 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 allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
