A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child 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
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view 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 the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
