A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
