A intense debate lately went viral on social media, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight 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 spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick 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 corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
