An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like 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.
