An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself 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 Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
