An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
