An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
