A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) 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 appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, 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 fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience 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 attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
