A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more 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 maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back 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 Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
