A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
