A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought 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 were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
