An intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter 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 body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
