An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
