A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
