An intense debate 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? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot 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 confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
