An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated 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 the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
