A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.