An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
