An heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
