A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
