An heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in 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 strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
