A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
