A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. 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 skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
