A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
