A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
