An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author 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 when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent 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 is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
