A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – 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 on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
