A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern 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 and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
