An heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
