An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland 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 conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
