A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
