An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, 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 against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance 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 terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
