An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
