An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
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 based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing 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 that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
