An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional 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 sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect 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 the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
