A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still 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 (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional 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 tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), 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. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
