An heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
