A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
