A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda 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 punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life 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, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (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 on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again 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, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
