An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility 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 the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
