An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
