A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
