An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females 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 little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict 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. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
