An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
