A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
