A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. 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 possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
