A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
