A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it 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 with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
