An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
