A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the 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.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, 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, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
