A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing 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 renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
