An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
