A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
