An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
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 flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
