A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
