A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
