An heated discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause 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 took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
