A intense debate recently went viral on social media, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
