A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour 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 Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
