An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional 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, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
