A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste 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 newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
