A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – 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 maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip 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 prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility 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, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
