A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
