A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur 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 taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour 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 some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
