An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.