An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
