An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
