An heated discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again 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 Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
