A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, 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 between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again 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, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
