A intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (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 fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
