An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor 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. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
