A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward 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 distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, 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 wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again 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 Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
