An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
