An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair 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 taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
