An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least 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 nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
