A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. 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 evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
