An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
