A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
