A intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
