A intense debate lately went viral on social media, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
