A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains 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, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
