An heated debate lately went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
