An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
