A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
