An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to 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 (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
