An heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
