An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
