A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
