A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household 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 lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
