An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. 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 prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
