An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives 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 being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension 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. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
