An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited 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 skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
