An heated debate lately went viral on social media, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the bear 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 decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
