A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives 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 escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
