An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on 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 societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
