A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
