An heated debate lately went viral on social media, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
