A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief 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 sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit 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 itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
