An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish 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, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
