A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate 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 clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
