An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – 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 maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
