A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
