An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. 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.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
