A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
