A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation 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. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
