An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered 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 new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). 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 sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
