A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate 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 coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
