An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
