A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child 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 Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
