A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. 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 offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
