A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
