A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression 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 spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
