An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
