An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction 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 sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
