An heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
