An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm 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 a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
