An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly 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, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
