An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
