An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
