A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – 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 definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
