A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist 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 conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
