An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience 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 opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
