A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing 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 populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
