A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
