A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
