A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
