A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi 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 distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
