A heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, 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 peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
