A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
