An heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights 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 Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
