A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
