A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
