A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
