An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
