A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland 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 lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets 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 body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears 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: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
