A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about 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 were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled 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 clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
