An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling 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 odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more 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 a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
