A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped 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 (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
