An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
