A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
