An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
