An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce 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 tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing 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 get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
