An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing 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 community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the 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 than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, 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 supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
