A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur 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 spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
