A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. 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 humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
