An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
