An intense debate recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate 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 clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
