An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains 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 sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
