An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
