An heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend 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 latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
