An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
