A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series 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 terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
