A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations 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, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
