An heated debate lately went viral on social media, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
