A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
