A heated debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
