A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
