A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers 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 had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
