A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision 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 Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
