An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household 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 locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
