A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside 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, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, 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 opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
