A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
