A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
