A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands 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 were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
