An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
