An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
