An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly 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 regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
