A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
