An heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
