An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. 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 the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability 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 – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
