An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at 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 Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
