An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
