An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles 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.
