A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
