A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come 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 locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
