An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. 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 attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
