A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring 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 peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
