An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (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 Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
