A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture 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 pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
