An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query 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 divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
