An heated debate recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
