A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly 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 sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, 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 opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
