An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
