A heated debate lately went viral on social media, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance 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
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
