An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on 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 household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
