A heated debate lately went viral on social media, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
