A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
